He held her eyes for one long, devastating second. Something like regret flickered.
“Go with them, Norah,” he said softly. “We can talk later.”
Another lie.
Hands closed around her arms, still gentle, still smiling for any donors who might glance their way. One of the guards shifted subtly, blocking her from the room’s view as they guided her toward a side corridor.
Panic surged, hot and dizzying. She opened her mouth.
“Don’t,” the man on her right murmured, the word shaped around a polite smile that could have passed for friendly from adistance. “You make a scene, and it gets messy. Nobody wants that.”
She did.
Oh, she definitely did.
Norah jerked her arm hard, testing angles and strength. She’d never been a fighter. Debate team, yes. Corporate strategy, yes. But adrenaline spiked through her so fast her muscles trembled with the need tomove. Torun. Tolive.
The guard on her left anticipated it, stepping in close, too close, his shoulder slotting in front of her chest as though shielding her from a camera flash. His palm clamped over her mouth, not roughly—professionally—and he bent his head as if whispering something tender to a date.
It probably looked like an embrace. Norah’s scream strangled uselessly against his hand.
“Easy,” he breathed, voice warm and utterly false. “We don’t want to scare anyone.”
She thrashed, nails catching his wrist, her heel slamming down toward his shoe. He absorbed the hit, grunting but not loosening. The other guard moved behind her, boxing her in, guiding her backward step by step. Every motion was practiced, a maneuver designed to look like assistance rather than abduction.
The gala carried on around them. Laughter rising, music swelling, Morris’s cadence rolling through the room. No one noticed the woman in an elegant black dress locked between two men, her eyes wide and wild above a hand pressed too tightly over her mouth.
Norah’s pulse roared. Her vision sparkled at the edges.
Think.
Think.
You can think your way out?—
She drove her elbow back, catching the rear guard in the ribs hard enough that he sucked in a sharp breath.
“Careful,” he muttered against her hair. “We’ll have to get rough if you keep that up.”
She shook her head violently, trying to free her mouth, but the one in front simply shifted, tucking her deeper into the angle of his shoulder, his hand sliding slightly to disguise the pressure. From across the room, it must have looked like a couple shielding an emotional moment.
And she realized—horrifyingly—that this was routine for them.
She tried to drag her heels. Tried to wedge her foot under a chair. Tried to catch the eye of a passing aide. Someone. Anyone.
But the music swelled, laughter rose, and people carried on behind them. The guards masked every jerk of her body, every attempt to twist free, with polite motions of helping her steady herself.
She wasn’t being escorted. She was being abducted in plain sight. Her pulse roared so loudly she could barely hear her own breath.
Her breath hitched. Tears stung. Not from fear exactly, but from fury. Helplessness. The shattering knowledge that she had sent away the one person who would have torn through this room to reach her.
She should have trusted him. Shedidtrust him—she was just too hurt to admit it.
The guards backed her toward a service door she’d barely noticed earlier. The carpeting muffled her stumbling steps. The corridor beyond yawned dark and narrow, the kind of place where screams went nowhere.
“No,” she tried to say, the sound crushed under the guard’s palm.
She bit him—hard.
